A year ago, there was a lot of talk about large language models (LLMs) playing chess. Word was that if you trained a big enough model on enough text, then you could send it a partially played game, ask it to predict the next move, and it would play at the level of an advanced amateur. This seemed important. These are “language” models, after all, designed to predict language. Now, modern LLMs are trained on a sizeable fraction of all the text ever created. This surely includes many chess games. ...